[Mailman-Users] Problem with inappropriate breaks in messages

[Chris Malme]

On 20/04/2010 18:14, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> That is the normal way of dealing with messages containing From_ in the
> message body. It's not just Mailman or pipermail, and it's problematic
> to unescape them for display, because while the escaping is normal,
> there is no standard for escaping/unescaping so when you see >From_ in
> a message, you don't know if it is an escaped From_, a quoted From_ or
> a literal >From_.

OK - that is different behaviour from the software I had been using, but if
that is how it works, then I am happy - I was more concerned that it was an
indication my installation might be broken than anything else. I take your
point about not knowing which it is, but in my experience, a quoted From_ is
most usually >_From_ not >From_, and I had been happy to take a potential
hit on the exceptions to this, as they would be far less common than the
escaped From_. But this is fairly unimportant, compared to the other problem
of archive corruption.

> The issue with unescaped From_ in the body causing archive corruption
> was fixed long before Mailman 2.1.9

>> To go to a more recent version is not impossible, but not trivial for me
>> (a Linux VPS newbie), so I wanted to see if it was the solution before >>
rolling my sleeves up.
>
> You shouldn't need to. Mailman 2.1.9 should not have this problem.

OK - that means the weirdness in my specific system, not in Mailman. Not
ideal, but at least I have narrowed things down a bit.

> I believe you, so I don't think I need to see the test list. The
> question is why isn't Mailman escaping the From_ when it archives and
> sends the message.
>
> It actually relies on the Python email library to do this, but Mailman
> 2.1.9 should install its own version of the email package in Mailman's
> pythonlib/ directory, and this should always escape From_ lines when
> converting an email.Message.Message object to text. Why it doesn't is
> the question.
>
> Also curious is that I think you said the problem occurs with
> "text\nFrom " in the body, but not with "text\n\nFrom ". If I
> understood that correctly, that is really strange.

Ah, no, it is happening with both "text\nFrom " and "text\n\nFrom ". It's
just that I encountered "text\nFrom " very early on. (the mail-list is
primarily about songwriting, which means we get lyrics posted to the list.
Hence there is a higher than normal chance that you will get new lines
starting with capitals.)

Anyway, many thanks for your help. While it hasn't resolved my immediate
problem, it has told me what it isn't, which is a great help. I'll go away
and have a fiddle. I am actually tempted to reinstall 2.1.9 myself from
scratch, which should have less issues regarding support than going to a new
version. Originally, my VPS was supposed to have Mailman (not sure what
version), but I had no access to it via Plesk (this is before I knew how to
configure it direct). The VPS support then said they had upgraded it, which
seemed to fix the problem. I can't help but wonder if they did a botched job
of it. First thing to check is if Mailman's pythonlib/ directory, which you
mention exists.

If I get anywhere, I will let you know!

Chris